The River is a life-spanning epic novel about death and new beginnings. There's a saying, beloved of Scottish grannies: "Whit's fur ye will no' go by ye". Seemingly embracing this maxim, Lachlan McCormack lives his life as aimless as a piece of driftwood, but somehow gets to where he always wanted to be - where the river meets the sea.

The novel is a love story, both to his childhood sweetheart, and to Scotland, and follows Lachlan's journey through seven decades of the nation's political, sporting and cultural history (and disappointments). Along the way, it appears that only death has the power to propel him onward, and the novel revisits the seven significant deaths that have shaped him and mapped his journey. It explores the cyclical nature of life, love, happiness, and Scotland's ongoing struggle with its place in the world.

Two boys can't remember the last time they had a hug.

Meet Finlay. He's studying for his nursing degree at Glasgow University, against all the odds. But coming straight from care means he has no support network.
How can he write essays, find paid work and NOT fall for the beautiful boy at uni, when he's struggling to even feed himself?

Meet Banjo. He's trying to settle in with his new foster family and finish high school. But he can't forget all that has happened, and his anger and fear keep boiling over. How can he hold on to the one good person in his life, when his outbursts keep threatening his already uncertain future?

Can Finlay and Banjo let go of the past before it drags them under?

Inspired by an infamous real-life case, The Mourning Necklace is the unforgettable new feminist historical novel from the Women’s Prize-longlisted author of The Maiden, Kate Foster.

They said I would swing for the crime and I did . . . I wear the rope-mark like a mourning necklace.

1724. In a tavern just outside Edinburgh, the family of Maggie Dickson – hanged for the murder of her newborn child – drown their sorrows, mourning her death yet relieved she is gone. Shame haunts them; passers-by avert their eyes from her cheap coffin on its rickety cart.

But as her family pray her soul rests in peace, a figure appears at the door.

It is Maggie. She is alive.

Bruised and dazed, Maggie has little time for her family’s questions. All that matters to her is answering one: will they hang her twice?

Life on a remote island is turned upside down by a stranger's arrival, testing bonds of family and tradition and leaving a young dreamer's future hanging in the balance.

It's no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence. The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper, known as The Father, and his otherworldly son, Ouse. Them, and the occasional lodger to keep the wolf from the door.

When one of those lodgers - Firth, a chaotic writer - arrives from Edinburgh, the limits of the world the keeper and his son cling to begin to crumble. A tug of war ensues between Firth and the lighthouse keeper for Ouse's affections - and his future. As old and new ways collide, and life-changing decisions loom, what will the tides leave standing in their wake?

Whisky is a bloody business . . .

When a dilapidated distillery comes up for sale in rural Kintyre, Eilidh and her wife Morag jump at the chance. But their ambition to run the first women-owned whisky distillery in Scotland seems to be scuppered when a grisly, decades-old secret is revealed: two dead bodies have been stuffed into barrels, perfectly preserved in single malt.

To add to their woes, a TV crew has just arrived and the townsfolk will not leave them alone. Eilidh becomes obsessed with solving the murders while juggling whisky tastings, ceilidhs, protests and scandals – everything you’d expect from a wee Scottish town imprisoned by its own geography. And no matter how hard you try, the locals will always find out your secrets.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BLOODY SCOTLAND DEBUT PRIZE

By the winner of the Betty Trask Prize - an atmospheric and powerfully menacing story about family, secrets and violence.

John and Liz have left the city behind to move to a remote house on the shores of the lake. Though the house is barely unpacked, Liz's sister, with her children and her husband, have come to visit for the August bank holiday weekend.

Over the course of a hot, slow weekend, tensions simmer; things go unsaid - between the two couples, between the two sisters. Their time together is punctured by visits from Jim, the solitary local warden for the area; and a group of students camping nearby draw closer and closer, finally infiltrating the house - and bringing their own tensions and hierarchies with them.

As the weekend draws to a close, the landscape reveals a violence that has long lain hidden - and the summer builds to its harrowing climax.

Taut and menacing, full of disquiet and tenderness, Groundwater is about the gulfs that lies between us and those we love - and the miraculous ways our deepest desires and fears manifest.

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, millions of lives changed in an instant.

Millions of people were suddenly on the move. In this great flow of people was a reporter from the north of Scotland. Jen Stout left Moscow abruptly, ending up on a border post in southeast Romania, from where she began to cover the human cost of Russian aggression. Her first-hand, vivid reporting brought the war home to readers in Scotland as she reported from front lines and cities across Ukraine. Stories from the night trains, birthday parties, military hospitals and bunkers: stories from the ground, from a writer with a deep sense of empathy, always seeking to understand the bigger picture, the big questions of identity, history, hopes and fears in this war in Europe.

Night Train to Odesa begins in Russia and continues to focus on people, relationships and individuals in Ukraine. It is the account of a young female reporter with no institutional backup or security. Both in language and themes, it is accessible and highly readable.

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK.

WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY FIRST BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD.

In a near-future United Kingdom ruled by Artificial Intelligence, biometrics, surveillance and silence, a Scottish village chooses to disappear rather than submit. The story spans 3 generations.

The Glendarragh Code is a lyrical, chilling dystopia about memory, resistance, and the quiet power of community. For readers of Orwell, Atwood, and those who fear the algorithm is already watching.

The new world didn’t arrive with violence.
It came wrapped in convenience.

BOOK REVIEW: The Glendarragh Code Offers a Stark, Lyrical Vision of the Post-Democratic Future
Reviewed by N. Fenwick

In Glendarragh Code, her haunting and quietly defiant debut novel, Lisa Marie Heitman-Bruce arrives with a voice at once elegiac and urgent, weaving a tale of collective resistance and intimate ruin amid a post-democratic United Kingdom. The book opens not with a gunshot but with a whisper of a world unraveling slowly, beautifully, fatally. It’s less The Hunger Games and more Station Eleven by way of The Handmaid’s Tale, though even those comparisons do little justice to the novel’s ferocious interiority and grave lyricism.

If Margaret Atwood cautioned us about power, and Emily St. John Mandel about collapse, Heitman-Bruce warns us about compliance and the slow erosion of the self beneath convenience, data, and fear. The novel is set in the not-so-distant year 2032, after Britain has quietly become something unrecognizable. There is no great cataclysm, no alien invasion, no civil war. What there is instead is data compliance: citizens sorted, judged, and erased through predictive algorithms and biometric infrastructure. Neighborhoods disappear into spreadsheets. People vanish into “category non-essential.” In the novel’s prologue - a dense, allusive piece of prose poetry - the cities fall, not to bombs, but to bandwidth. It is one of the most arresting openings of recent dystopian fiction: “The ultimate cruelty was not violence. It was irrelevance. No one murdered them; instead, a slow, glacial deletion, devoid of ceremony or even hatred, consigned them to oblivion.”

It’s difficult not to feel the chill of Orwell here, but where 1984 raged at totalitarianism, Glendarragh Code mourns the people who stopped noticing it. It’s not Big Brother that kills the future; it’s the passive acceptance of platforms, apps, cameras, and convenience. It is a story about the architecture of soft power.

The title Glendarragh Code refers to a remote Scottish village where the story unfolds through an ensemble of characters drawn together by survival and something that feels like fragile hope. Heitman-Bruce writes each one not just as a character but as a full psychological geography. This novel is not about heroes, but the slow work of resisting.

Dystopian fiction often falls into two traps: didacticism or nihilism. Heitman-Bruce avoids both. Glendarragh Code is deeply political. Its central metaphor is compliance culture turned lethal. But it never reduces its themes to slogans. It understands that tyranny does not always arrive in obvious ways, and that oppression today is more likely to wear the face of “efficiency,” “public safety,” or “terms and conditions.”

There is a clear critique here of surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance, and digital erasure, but it is delivered through the lives of people, not polemic. The climax is emotional, not explosive. The signal that changes everything is not a call to war. The question is not “Can we win?” but “Can we remain human?”

This philosophical quietness is the novel’s greatest risk and its greatest reward. There are no easy answers. The resistance does not promise victory, only integrity. In a culture hungry for spectacle,Glendarragh Code offers something more dangerous: contemplation.

Scotland's Clans & their Tartans: The Histories and Origins of the Clans and their Tartan Plaids

Explore the fascinating history of Scotland's clans and explore the stories behind their iconic tartans in this comprehensive guide.

Scotland's Clans & their Tartans offers an authoritative exploration of the origins and evolution of Scotland's unique clan system, tracing its roots back to the 5th century in Ireland, where the Scots originally lived. From the Abercrombies to the Wemyss clan, this comprehensive book provides detailed entries on the history of each clan, including their geographical origins, notable clansmen, and the evolution of their distinctive tartan patterns.

With over 150 tartans beautifully displayed in full color images, this guide serves as both a visual celebration and an exhaustively researched reference for historians, enthusiasts, and anyone with an ancestral connection to Scotland alike.

Whether you're a proud Scot or simply fascinated by the intricacies of Scottish heritage, Scotland's Clans & their Tartans will make an essential addition to your collection.